Biomedicine Update: Initiative 2045 – Immortality for Billionaires

The manifesto of the 10,000 members of Initiative 2045 begins with the following:

“Honorable businessmen and businesswomen, members of the Forbes richest list: human life is unique and priceless.  It is only when we have to part with life do we realize just how much we have not done, that we have not had enough time to do what we really wanted or to address something we’ve done wrong. Everything that we have cherished and loved all of a sudden becomes unreachable.

Today you have a unique chance to change this situation.  And at the same time bring invaluable benefits to your countries and the world as well as make a mark in history by supporting the creation of the new industry of immortality. You have the power to support and create a new industry of immortality to make revolutionary change that will forever reverberate through the pages of history.”

The current membership total is 11,946.  The goal is to create immortal rich people who can then pass along their collective wisdom to those of us who have not yet achieved billionaire-dom. This will be achieved through the convergence of human brains and technology. There are four stages to the evolution of this convergence:

2015-20

Creation of an anthropomorphic robot controlled through a brain-computer interface to act on behalf of its controlling operator in situations where human presence would be endangered.

2020-25

Development of autonomous life-support for human brains linked to robots for those whose bodies have worn out.

2030-35

Creation of technology for transferring human consciousness to one or more robots.

2045

Often referred to as the singularity by futurists such as Ray Kurzweil, this technology will free human minds from human bodies and we will evolve into a new converged species – half human, half machine.

Folks. Hold on to your nano-hats because if you refer to my last blog posting on connectomics and human immortality you can decipher in part how researchers are tackling the job of discovering all aspects of how our minds store and process information, neuron by neuron, synapse to synapse. Once we have imaged and fully mapped the human brain Initiative 2045 intends to reverse engineer it creating an instruction manual for assembling an artificial brain.